William Tilleczek Receives the 2024 Leo Strauss Award for “Powers of Practice: Michel Foucault and the Politics of Asceticism”, Political Science Now, August 9, 2024
The Leo Strauss Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in political philosophy.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Dr. Tilleczek’s “Powers of Practice: Michel Foucault and the Politics of Asceticism” is a meticulously crafted, exceptionally creative, deeply erudite, and beautifully written study of Foucault’s thought that recasts his contributions to contemporary analyses of neoliberalism and a politics of freedom. The dissertation’s accomplishments are noteworthy on several fronts. First, it offers a new approach to reading Foucault centered on his attentions to asceticism, understood not as a normative but rather a methodological framework that situates practices of ethical self-fashioning within their socio-political and interpersonal contexts. Joining a biographical account of Foucault with careful exegesis of his later writings on care of the self, Dr. Tilleczek elaborates a ‘general ascetology’ in which understanding power and agency as they pertain to practices of self-improvement remains a matter of historical anthropological investigation. Second, Dr. Tilleczek’s approach enables them to surface continuities between the different phases of Foucault’s work, persuasively showing how his ‘turn to antiquity’ recuperates his earlier account of discipline as a modern ascetological apparatus. Avoiding heavy-handed impositions of unity across Foucault’s corpus, Dr. Tilleczek makes their case through nuanced argumentation, deft interpretive analyses, and productively provocative intertextual readings. Third, Dr. Tilleczek’s account of Foucault’s general ascetology and the anthropology of ethics subtending it introduces rich resources, conceptual and hermeneutic, for understanding neoliberalism and its self-fashioning homo economicus. The dissertation demonstrates how self-optimization, as the generalized ‘practice imperative’ of a marketized society, both reproduces its social inequalities and cultivates forms of life that can subvert its modes of governance. Taken as a whole, “Powers of Practice” succeeds admirably not only in making significant contributions to our understanding of a pivotal and often divisive thinker but also in enabling us to ‘think (and see) what we are doing’ in the present from a fresh perspective.
William Tilleczek is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University and L’Université de Montréal, where he is a member of the Research Group on Constitutional Studies and the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes, respectively. Previously, he was a Visiting Professor at Deep Springs College.
Originally from Sudbury (ON), he studied in Halifax (NS) and Toronto (ON) before completing a PhD in Government at Harvard University.
His recent works are united by an interest in ascesis/training and touch on themes and thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, anti-colonial ethics, artificial intelligence, and the moralization of poverty. His first book project works with and beyond Foucault to intervene in current debates regarding the “old” (structuralist) and “new” (individualist) left. Combining insights from classical political philosophy, Marxism, Foucault, and post-colonial theory, he is working to sketch the contours of “the means of training” as a general political problem: How are citizens forced to train, invited to train, prohibited from training? Who has access to meaningful modes of self-transformation, who is forced to train their body as a tool for the gains of the dominant? How can we collectively shape institutions that enable the ascesis required to fulfill our ethical and political goals?
Will also works as a translator and has recently published an English version of Simone Weil’s “Rationalisation.”
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism, Polity, 2023
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